Employment, Latvia, Legislation, Markets and Companies

He said that only actual jobs eliminated would be counted in when determining whether the ministries and the government agencies had met the target of the reform in the public administration, which is a 6% reduction of employees.

The organizations will not be allowed to claim they have met the target, if they had simply eliminated the vacant jobs on their payrolls, Citskovskis stressed.

The total number of vacancies in the Latvian public administration was 3,678 at the end of last year but certain organizations have quite high rates of vacant jobs. For example, 15% of all jobs in the Education and Science Ministry and the subordinate organizations were vacant, with 15% of vacancies in the ministry itself. The Health Ministry's realm followed with 12% of vacancies, of which 10% were vacant jobs in the ministry itself.

Citskovskis said that, while many organizations had tried to negotiate exemptions from the planned job reduction, just few had been made exempt, such as the army, the security agencies, the Corruption Prevention Bureau and employees in the foreign representation offices of the Foreign Ministry.

As reported, the Cabinet of Ministers in November 2017 approved a plan for a public administration reform, which provides for cutting the number of public administration jobs by 2% annually until 2020. The goal is to reduce the number of public administration jobs by around 6% or 3,000 full-time jobs in three years.